A couple years ago a bunch of credit card companies suddenly decided they wanted to dictate how people are allowed to spend their money. They issued warnings to game stores to delist all nsfw games or else. The credit card companies have an amazing racket going on and I struggle to believe they suddenly care about some morality over profit. Generally all they care about is that people spend as much money as possible. I also seem to recall them being notably silent on the much larger revenue streams coming from adult videos. So what was their actual purpose in these seemingly random strikes?
https://outrungaming.com/mastercard-addresses-nsfw-game-censorship-statement/
Payment processors got petitioned (from an anti-porn group) to ban games with rape, incest, and sexual violence*, and it went from there. Steam and itch couldn’t tell which games had the suspected content in them iirc, steam delisted in batches while itch had to manually review everything. Public perception played a factor in why the payment processors acted the way they did. Then you had the backlash to the treats being taken away, even gog gave away some nsfw games (but none of them had rape, incest, or sexual violence so weren’t being currently boycotted). Now it’s harder to get a nsfw game approved on steam. Also this anti-porn group has gotten other games like rape simulators (No Mercy) delisted before. So they had experience.
*I should have also noted that CP was a part of it. I did not see that on steam but the other stuff was 100% in steam’s library.